All,
warning: crazy idea time
Does it seem like a good idea to provide a way to attach "user comments"
to network information?
Background...
Some people want someone to force ISP's to take responsibility for
fixing abuse originating in their networks. The natural place for this
enforcement appears to them to be the RIPE NCC (*).
Contrariwise, the RIPE NCC is unable to unwilling to change its role
from a fundamentally administrative to one that involves setting
network usage policies. This involves risks in terms of anti-trust
regulators, need to carefully define the limits of control, and setting
up what amounts to a industry legal system (with both judges and
police). Plus it is hard to get the RIPE NCC membership to support
mechanisms which cost them money and limit their freedoms.
On the 3rd hand, some people in the RIPE community (including me)
also feel that it is very, very difficult to define what the required
actions would be in the case of reported abuse. This reporting
mechanism itself might indeed be a source of abuse (rivalries between
companies could be fought by each accusing the other of hosting
criminal activity).
Crazy Idea...
Lets crowd-source it.
Maybe it makes sense to make something like a web forum for each
allocated resource, or perhaps for the organization responsible for
each. It could be something like a blog article with the contact and
other information about each resource, and then a way to post comments
about it. So, you might see that ISP ShaNet has working e-mail for
abuse, but nobody ever sees any action beyond automated response. Such
reports could be useful for people who *can* investigate and do
something, such as law enforcement or regulators.
A few decades of Internet forums have given us best practices in terms
of policing forums for spam and abuse, for evaluating user
trustworthiness and helpfulness, and for evaluating the value of
individual comments or replies (+1).
I think something like this would be within the realm of things that
the RIPE NCC could provide. We could link to these pages from the WHOIS
results (or go straight there for web queries perhaps).
There are lots of web sites which publish consumer evaluations of
various companies and products, so this really is not so different.
--
Shane
(*) Well, normally confused with RIPE (or Ripe). But the RIPE NCC is
what they mean.
